How Sanjay Jha Overhauled Motorola's Culture

Sanjay Jha got Motorola to build two innovative new smartphones by first redesigning the way the company worked.

Saul Hansell

Sanjay Jha seems to be on track to pull Motorola's cellphone division out of a tailspin.

The company is hardly flying high. It reported ever-so-slightly better than expected third-quarter earnings Thursday morning (meaning it earned a penny a share, rather than breaking even as expected). But its sales of cellphones are still plummeting even faster than analysts predicted.

I wrote in Thursday's Times about how Mr. Jha found a tiny group in the company devoted to Google's Android operating system, mixed it with handsets on track to be Windows Mobile phones, and created the Droid, a new smartphone being trumpeted for Christmas by Verizon Wireless.

How could a company that seemed so flatfooted suddenly start running so fast?

When I asked Mr. Jha how he did it, his answer was "reviews, reviews, reviews."

On the Borscht Belt, that's the answer to the question, "How do you get invited back to Carnegie Hall?"

But in Mr. Jha's case he means a detailed analysis of a project, like the one I described in the article when he first learned about Motorola's tiny Android effort. Mr. Jha likes PowerPoint, but he wants the slides before a meeting, so he can dig deeply into whatever the issues are.

And indeed every story I heard in several days of reporting at Motorola's wireless headquarters in Libertyville, Ill., seemed to involve a long meeting at night or on the weekend, with Mr. Jha poring over slides and drawing diagrams on a whiteboard.

I don't think Mr. Jha was saying that the solution to Motorola's problems was meetings. Rather, it had a culture that avoided making critical decisions and focused more on internecine competition than competing in the market.

As soon as he arrived, Mr. Jha asked each of the division's top 15 executives to tell him what was wrong with the company (in the form of two PowerPoint slides, natch).

"There were lots of cryptic things about how I'm doing things okay, but the other guys aren't," he said. "The common theme is we were not making decisions."

Mr. Jha said he often heard another refrain, that the company was dragged down by its "engineering culture." This criticism he rejected.

"The problem wasn't the engineering culture," Mr. Jha recalled telling people. "We weren't connecting the engineers to the market and giving them problems to work on that matter."

The blame, he said, rested squarely on management. "A fish rots at the head first," he declared.

There was no better proof of that than the jumble of chips, operating systems and other software used on the company's phones. Companies like Nokia build phones around a handful of standard designs, but Motorola was starting fresh on nearly every handset.

When he arrived, Motorola used 22 different phone displays, each a different size, thus requiring different software. This makes for higher costs, lower quality and slower development time. And it confuses customers too.

"On my 13th day on the job, I had a meeting with Vodafone," the world's largest wireless carrier, Mr. Jha recalled. Three separate Motorola product groups pitched their handset ideas. "The Vodafone executive said, 'Wow. Could you please pick one device and let me know what you think I should buy?'"

Yet with all this duplicated effort, Motorola was still not making the phones that people wanted to buy. It was simply trying to replicate its success with the Razr, the sleek voice-only phone that ultimately sold more than 100 million units worldwide. It didn't have the product management skill to spot the shift to more versatile devices.

"Tell me how you miss 1G to 2G, 2G to 3G, black-and-white to color, to camera to touch to QWERTY" keyboards, he said with no small exasperation. "We, as an organization, missed a lot of transitions."

Like many classic American industrial companies, Motorola used a hierarchical system that put a single executive in charge of each product or business area, with dedicated engineering and marketing teams. This approach is meant to ensure accountability.

"The motto here was 'one throat to choke,'" said Juergen Stark, Motorola's vice president for business operations.

This method gives executives no incentive to say their product line is on the decline and the technology used by a rival group will be the next big trend.

Mr. Jha completely redesigned the Motorola organization chart using a model typical of technology companies. There are now central groups for engineering, marketing, product management and long-term product planning. And he created a council (a favorite structure of Cisco's chief executive, John Chambers) where these groups hash out their differences.

Some long-time Motorola execs were aghast that there would not be "one throat to choke" for mistakes. But Mr. Jha bet that mutual accountability might create the urgency the company so sorely lacked.

"Someone asked Sanjay who gets shot if a product isn't successful," Mr. Stark said. "His answer was we all get shot."

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